Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Coding Precondition

I think there are certain conditions that need to exist for a programmer to start coding. This is the condition that if not fulfilled can make the programming task harder, unfocused, distracted and will produce mostly suboptimal result.

This is different for everybody and depend on many factors like exposure to available technologies, experiences, working environment. However, the same theme here is that those things need to be available before we can do main task with flow and minimum distraction.

Here's an example on the things that I find as a precondition :

  • Roadmap. However vague, without it the coding feels like going nowhere, we are also have little structure to based our technical choices.
  • Issue Tracker. Beyond coding for practice, you will need some kind of tracking of what you want to achieve, what you currently are and what the next step is. It could range from a mere text file or something monstrous, pick your choice.
  • Revision Control. Coding without it will feels like coding in the middle of land-mines. The feeling of safety that if we make mistakes we could always mistake leverage the way our brain solve the current problem since it is now feel more free to experiment and explore solutions.
  • Integrated Environment. It could be several tools that you combine yourself and make work together or a full-blown IDE or any other combination. The key is to make them work seamless as from coding to running and work naturally as the extension of your thoughts to concrete implementation. This is also include the libraries you are depend on, it should be in-place, tested and integrated first.
  • References. Gather relevant core references of what you currently working on within short reach, it will speed things up compare to relying solely on just-in-time research.
The ideal to be achieved is the condition where the programmer would only do mostly : think about the problem, test, code, debug, commit with minimum unrelated task come up.

Programming precondition worth to be prioritized whenever any of them is a little broken. Personally, I think it's worth to stop whatever I am doing to get those precondition work/clear in top shape first before start moving on again with the main work.

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